Recalibrating intercultural governance in Australian Indigenous organisations: the case of Aboriginal community controlled health

Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Services (ACCHSs) have a strong track record of delivering comprehensive primary health care in Australia, but the sector also suffers from governance challenges. This article argues that a combination of settler-state dominance of governance arrangements and inadequate conceptualisation of governance in the sector have led to the risk of ‘controlled communities’ – either quasi-government control of organisations or the control of individual ACCHSs by a small cohort of members. In response, we deploy a political rather than technical approach to governance to consider the contested and intercultural nature of ACCHSs governance alongside recent governance initiatives in Southeast Queensland that signal the value of disaggregating and delineating different forms of governance in the sector. Key conceptual steps and a matrix for recalibrating intercultural governance are presented to support further research, to clarify lines of jurisdiction, and inform governance reform in and around ACCHSs.     

Biopolitics meets Terrapolitics: Political Ontologies and Governance in Settler-Colonial Australia

Crises persist in Australian Indigenous affairs because current policy approaches do not address the intersection of Indigenous and European political worlds. This paper responds to this challenge by providing a heuristic device for delineating Settler and Indigenous Australian political ontologies and considering their interaction. It first evokes Settler and Aboriginal ontologies as, respectively, biopolitical (focused through life) and terrapolitical (focused through land). These ideal types help to identify important differences that inform current governance challenges. The paper discusses the entwinement of these traditions as a story of biopolitical dominance wherein Aboriginal people are governed as an ‘included-exclusion’ within the Australian political community. Despite the overall pattern of dominance, this same entwinement offers possibilities for exchange between biopolitics and terrapolitics and, hence, for breaking the recurrent crises of Indigenous affairs.